Take A Look At Margherita Missoni’s Italian Home

Take A Look At Margherita Missoni’s Italian Home – Margherita Missoni and husband Eugenio Amos, a race-car driver, both grew up in the Italian small-town of Varese. After travelling the world, they felt like that was the perfect place to raise their family of four. Today, Interior Decoration takes you on a tour of the colourful and eclectic property.

Varese is a city in the Alpine foothills about an hour’s train ride to the north of Milan that became popular in the mid-1800s as a getaway for the capital’s wealthy citizens. Today, its best-known residents are probably the Missonis, fashion’s famous knitwear clan. Ottavio and Rosita Missoni established the company nearby in 1953, and the region still serves as the base for design operations and home to many family members.

Though Missoni is synonymous with celebrities and A-listers, Varese remains a quiet and calm town. When Margherita Maccapani Missoni, herself a designer and the eldest of the family’s third generation (her mother, Angela Missoni, is currently the creative director of the brand), married Eugenio Amos, a race-car driver who also grew up there, she used the hashtag #VareseThePlaceToBe as an ironic tribute to her beloved hometown. “It was surreal to see all of my friends from the fashion world descend here,” she recalls. The gag went viral, and “it ended up on the front page of the local newspapers!”.

Now at 35, Missoni Amos left Varese after highschool and lived in places like Milan, New York or Paris. After she and Amos married, she craved a home where they could put down roots back in the place they grew up. So, in the next year, after finding the ideal site, the couple enlisted Milan-based architect Aldo Cibic to build a four-bedroom house there.

Missoni Amos insisted on handling the interiors herself. “Which was maybe a mistake,” she admits. “I’d never done a house before, and I underestimated how much work it entailed. I thought I’d just be picking out wallpaper. Ha!” Now, five years later, she’s finally finished. “It turned out to be the biggest job I’ve ever done, and I can’t help but be extremely proud of it.”

The Missoni brand is known for its use of bold colours and prints and that is very noticeable in the house. “Colour and shape took priority over period coherence,” Missoni Amos says. The majority of the furnishings were sourced online—“Cruising eBay is one of my favourite activities”—or found on frequent day trips with Amos.

The daring design sense that’s part of Missoni Amos’s DNA is evident throughout the house. One of the first things installed was a giant Spider-Man on the ceiling of the playroom for her two boys, Otto, five this month, and Augusto, three. “And they haven’t gotten bored of it yet!”, she says.

The kitchen floor and walls are clad in a punchy artisanal tile. “It turned out to be the most expensive material per square foot in the entire house, which my husband is still trying to make sense of.”

“My favourite room is my office—it’s the only part of the house that is entirely mine,” Missoni Amos says, admitting that it’s a relief to her husband that she has a place to display her collections of daisies—margherita means “daisy” in Italian—and Venetian masks. It even has a separate entrance so that she can conduct meetings without disrupting the rest of the house. Amos has his own space, the garage, where he houses his car collection.

The master bedroom’s Albizia wood four-poster, which Missoni Amos had been wanting for a long time, is by Mauro Mori. “I’ve been wanting it since before the house was built, so when the time came to make it, we made sure it was as big as could be—perfect for family cuddles in the morning.”

A garden mural painted by Pictalab, an artist collective based in Milan, covers the dining room’s walls—and ceiling. Flamboyant marbles, including one nicknamed Missoni by the company that supplied it, and bold Josef Frank wallpapers for Svenskt Tenn define the bathrooms.

“When I was growing up, I couldn’t wait to get out. It was only when I was living in the biggest city of them all, New York, that I realized how lucky I was to have these roots and such a deep sense of belonging. When I got pregnant, we didn’t even question where we were going to settle our family—it was going to be back in #VareseThePlaceToBe.”